Innovative Design Of Apple's New Imac Makes It A Pc With Personality

CYBERSPACE

Apple's new personal computer won't hit the stores until August, but the company already has introduced it via an Internet Web site.

It takes just one click of the mouse after arriving at http://www.apple.com to bring onto the screen a page headlined "Whoa."

And there sits the iMac, curvy and compact in its translucent blue-and-white plastic case that glows in the dark, so user-friendly that one industry analyst has already described it as looking "more like a beach toy than a computer."

That's OK with Apple, seeking to revive its sagging fortunes by unveiling a next-generation product described as "not just a completely new computer, but a completely new idea."

And although it still has to pass the performance test, the iMac is already being applauded in the design community for personal appearance, even though, unlike the computer trade press, many have seen only pictures. "They're extending the visual language that helps to define their company," said Bob Schwartz, executive director of the Industrial Designers Society of America, based in Great Falls, Va. "They've always marched to a different drummer and they're doing it again."

In unveiling the iMac (the "i" is for Internet) to the computer trade this month, Apple described the new computer as combining all the possibilities of the Internet with all the capabilities of Apple's famously accessible Mac operating system.

Billed as the easiest way to get up and running on the Internet, the iMac comes fully loaded with everything a user needs to get online, including a 4gb hard drive, 32mb of memory, a speedy 233-megahertz G3 processor and 33.6-Kbps modem (which some critics say is a little slow). With a competitive price of $1,299, it's aimed not only at re-energizing Apple's devout following of Mac users but also at luring new converts from the rival Windows camp.

"We hope the iMac will sell millions," said Apple spokesman Russell Brady. "When we looked at the competition in the $1,300 consumer category, they were using last week's technology and kind of cruddy monitors, and they were really ugly."

Apple's industrial design group not only combined better, faster technology, better networking and a handsome 15-inch display monitor, he said, they decided to make an all-out pitch for the consumer market, including the first-time shopper. In a radical break from the ongoing parade of dowdy beige and putty boxes, the iMac's glowing blue-and-white shell, Apple predicts, will be as refreshing on a display shelf as a rainbow in a leaden sky.

"When you enter the consumer market, fashion is important," Brady said. "We wanted a computer that would stand out from the crowd, that would make a design statement."

"Design statement" is rarely part of the language in the engineering-driven world of computers, even personal computers and laptops. Apple's aesthetic gamble is attributed to the energetic efforts of legendary co-founder Steve Jobs to reverse the company's plummeting sales. Jobs rejoined the company as interim chief in July, a decade after he was forced out as chairman. Wrote Time magazine's David Jackson of the unveiling: "Depending on your point of view, the translucent blue iMac computer is either the coolest or the weirdest-looking personal computer ever made. It's fast, it's cheap, and if you're looking for a cute little PC to go with one of those new Volkswagen Beetles, this is the one. The only question is: Will the iMac be good enough to save the company?"

Whether it turns the company around remains to be seen, but industrial designers agree that the iMac will turn heads. "Apple has freshened a (personal computer) category that had gone flat -- everything is putty-colored or charcoal gray. It gets to be a yawn after a while," said the Industrial Designers Society's Schwartz.

"They're reviving that emotional attachment that people had to their original Macs," said Mark Kimbrough at Design Edge in Austin, Texas, whose company is a major player in technology design.

Although so far he has only seen the iMac on a Web site, Kimbrough said it clearly has a different look. "It's so refreshing to see that Apple hasn't abandoned what put them on the map in the first place -- product with personality."

Bob Brunner of San Francisco designed for Apple during some of its most creative years, working on, among other things, the first low-cost color Mac. He applauds the new look. "It's a cool thing and a bold stroke," said Brunner, now a partner in Pentagram, an international design company. Studying pictures of the new computer, he finds "the big thing for me is the material and the translucency."

While it might be considered risky to jump onto the current plastics bandwagon, he said, it's an important design factor. "Because there's a sheet-metal shield for radiation reasons, the light bounces off in an interplay that takes advantage of the product's inherent structure."

Such design considerations, almost second nature in most consumer product categories, are still rare in personal computers, said Brunner. "The bottom line in the computer business is that most people making decisions are engineers who are eager to adopt new technology but unsophisticated about design.